Today in Latin America

Soldiers and police officers seized 105-tons of marijuana during a series of pre-dawn raids in three Tijuana neighborhoods. Before the raids a shootout occured between security forces and gunmen in a convoy of vehicles, where 11 people were arrested.

“The seizure of these drugs is without precedent in the country,” General Alfonso Duarte told reporters, according to the BBC. The bags are still being counted and the exact figure of the drugs confiscated could increase, Duarte added.

Tijuana, along with other Mexican cities bordering the U.S., has taken much of the brunt of the conflict between the Mexican government and the country’s drug cartels. Since Calderón launched a crackdown in 2006, deploying 50,000 troops, there have been some 28,000 deaths related to the violence.

Just Published at the Latin America News Dispatch

With it the nation’s toughest state immigration law, Arizona has taken center stage in the national debate about immigration as the midterm elections approach. Molly O’Toole reports from Arizona in a three-part series.

“Common Sense” I was a freshman at the Ohio State University in 1970 when I first read Thomas Paynes Common Sense.

I was not the usual 18 year old freshman common on the campus. I was attending on the GI bill because I was a combat veteran who had served two tours in Viet Nam. I was at that time a very right wing supporter of the war who had voted for Richard Nixon. All that was about to change.

It wasn’t an abrupt change, but a gradual one. I had heard that my ex wife was smoking pot. I was horrified. I thought that this was the first step, then would come heroin. This was the message. It was a gateway drug. Then came Kent state and my exposure to intelligence. Not the kind I had been exposed to serving in miliary intelligence in my sevice, but real intelligence you get from higher education.

Perhaps the most important quote from Thomas Payne is ” a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom.” This is the defense heard most today from the uninformed. The prohibitionists. It is simply a custom that prohibition is not wrong that makes it seem right. Nothing could be further from the truth. Prohibition has never worked and it never will work. Going all the way back to Adam and Eve. It simply never has worked.

There is a documentery coming out on the prohibition alcohol. I hope everbody watches it.